When news came on of the horrific stabbing of Sir David Amess came through at around midday on Friday, my first thoughts were disgust and horror at the stabbing itself followed by prayers for the man and his family. I prayed that he would survive the stabbing attack but it wasn’t to be.

The initial news of the attack caused me to consider what sort of awful individual and over what cause would drive someone to do this to Sir David? My first thoughts were ‘a random nutter’ but later as more information came out about the attack, the stench of Jihadism started to rise like a noisome miasma from the various news reports about this incident.

I did consider that there might be other, non Islamic reasons behind this attack but none of them really fitted the story. Everything that came out about the attack pointed to Islam.

There was the choice of target, a high profile MP who had worked to highlight the plight of dissidents in Iran, who was associated with the Conservative Friends of Israel group and who was said to have been instrumental in stopping a pro-Hamas march taking place in the UK. All those aspects pointed to Sir David being a person who was not talked of fondly in Islamic circles.

Then there was the nature of the venue for the murder, a church and the day of the week that this atrocity took place on. For Jihadists, killing someone in a church, the religious building of one of Islam’s spiritual opponents would give the murder an extra significance. Also this killing took place on a Friday, a ‘holy’ day for Islam and also a day when extremist Muslims choose to kill. Friday is killing day when it comes to Islam and although not every Islamic atrocity takes place on a Friday, enough do to make it noteworthy.

In addition to these two pointers in the direction of Jihad, there was the fact that the alleged murderer used a knife in his attack and was described as being a 25 year old man who didn’t try to flee from the scene. This behaviour went against much of what I learned of the criminal mind when I was a court reporter and what I’ve gleaned from reading numerous crime reports over the years. Violent 25 year old men, especially those who use knives as their chosen weapon, do not normally hang around when they attack people, they usually flee in order to not be apprehended by the police. I could not think of any political cause, other than Islam, where an assailant would kill in this manner and then just hang around waiting to be arrested. This behaviour is the behaviour of a nutcase who didn’t understand what they were doing, hence the failure to flee or a Jihadist who believes that they are doing Allah’s work in committing a murder and therefore didn’t care if he was arrested.

The behaviour of the media and the police also alerted me to the possibility that this was a Jihad murder and not a nutter or someone propelled into violence by some other cause. Even taking into account matters such as sub judice with regards to reporting on this case, information about the nature of the assailant was unusually sparse. There was no description of the suspect nor any reports of any interaction between the victim and the suspect and no reports that the suspect had shouted out the Islamic war cry of ‘Allah hu Akbar’ during the attack.

Then there was the initial cageyness of the police. This was a straight up and down non-complex murder and I would have expected that charges would have been laid around six pm, three hours after Sir David had been reported to have died. After all this is not a case where the police had to search hard for the alleged murderer nor need time to gather enough evidence to bring a charge. All of that information was laid before the police as if on a plate quite early on. Of course it’s possible that the true identity of the alleged assailant had to be determined as it’s likely that a Jihad murderer might be uncooperative with the police regarding their real identity and might have been operating under a false identity which could have contributed to the delay. But, this is not the 1950’s. Today’s police have far better ways of determining true identity than was the case back then. To be fair to the police, if they knew or suspected that this was a Jihad murder then they might have kept this fact quiet in order to ascertain whether or not there were other Muslim extremists involved in this attack in order to apprehend them, but this doesn’t seem to apply in this case. They had the alleged murderer and had ascertained a motive and the motive was Islamic terrorism but kept quiet as long as they were able to.

I feel, as do many others out there, that if this situation had been different with a different motive and different alleged murderer, then more information would have come out and come out more swiftly. If, for example the assailant had not been a Somali motivated by Jihadism but instead had been a White man motivated by extreme nationalist politics or an anti-vaxxer or a far Leftist or even just a plain old out of control mental patient, then I suspect that more information would have been given about the suspect, the motive and the incident itself and would have been imparted to the public far earlier than it was.

When the news first came through I did consider, for a moment, that this attack might have been motivated by something else other than Islam, after all it was quite possible. However, none of the alternatives fitted the circumstances or fitted the information given in the various news reports.

Late last night it was revealed that this incident was what I initially expected it to be, which was one related to Islam. The murder suspect is said to be a man of ‘Somali heritage’ who holds British nationality and that the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command are examining a ‘possible link to Islamist terrorism’. The Met police have raided two properties in London in connection to this terrorist incident and the suspect is being held in an Essex Police station.

This was without a doubt a terrible attack in which an MP has lost his life and a family has lost a father and a wife has lost a husband. It was, as many others have said, an attack not just on an MP but an attack on democracy itself. I pray for the soul of Sir David Amess and boil with anger that Britain has been afflicted yet again by an attack by a follower of the religion of un-peace.

I suspect that there will be a great deal of fallout from this latest Islamic murder a subject I will discuss in a later article as it is not appropriate and too lengthy to go into here. I will leave you with the chilling fact that this particular alleged Jihad murder suspect and extremist is not a ‘one off’. There are 43,000 other similar potentially violent radicals, mostly Islamic ones it needs to be said, out there currently being monitored by the various security services and probably tens of thousands more, who have not yet come to the attention of the authorities.